Automated 'solutions' are changing the social media landscape

When it becomes possible to automatically build a Twitter profile with 100,000 followers, is the value of the medium compromised?

I would suggest no, but perhaps we will stop putting sway in the number of followers a person has and instead assess them by the quality of their tweets. The instant you introduce a metric to measure the impact of anything, be it a web page's importance (PageRank) or a Twitter's relevance (Followers), people will subvert the system to their advantage.

With this in mind, I'm starting a new project. I'm going to create a twitter user who never tweets. I'm going to try to secure 100,000 followers, without every saying anything. If you'd like to follow my progress, look at Kay Knowing's (shy100k) profile on Twitter.